The Death of Contract

Second Edition

Grant Gilmore
Edited by Ronald K. L. Collins

“Anyone
interested in the fate of modern law will want to ponder the large and
provocative claims advanced in this witty and insightful book.” —Anthony T.
Kronman, Dean, Yale Law School

“Gilmore
altered forever the way we look at contract law.” —Dennis Patterson, Rutgers
University School of Law

“A timeless book. The Death of Contract is one of the staples
of the literature of the common law.” —Richard A. Epstein, University of
Chicago Law School

“Gilmore packs an epic into a
short impressionistic story of the rise and fall of classical contract. . . . An
uncommonly insightful and always engaging work.” —Jean Braucher, College of Law,
University of Cincinnati

The Death of
Contract is a masterful commentary on the common law, especially the law of
promissory obligation known as contracts. In this slim and lively book, the late
Yale law professor Grant Gilmore examines the birth, development, death, and
even the resurrection of a body of American law. It is both a modern-day reply
to and a funeral oration for an American legal classic—Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
The Common Law.

This new edition,
with an instructive and timely foreword by Ronald K. L. Collins, challenges
anyone interested in the life of the law to think about where it has come from
and where it is tending. As such, The Death of Contract still retains its
vitality in the brave new world of the law known as contracts. A new
bibliography of early reviews and new responses reveals how considerable the
interest was, and continues to be, in this modern anti-classic.